Meeting the current demand for STEM graduates requires significantly increasing the number of students majoring in STEM fields. One program designed to increase the number of STEM majors is Project Lead The Way (PLTW). Using statewide data from Indiana, this research examined the effects of PLTW participation in high school on the likelihood of…

We examine the effect of an integrity pilot campaign on undergraduates' behavior. As with many costly small-scale experiments and pilot programs, our statistical inference has to rely on small sample size. To tackle this issue, we perform a Bayesian retrospective power analysis. In our setup, a lecturer intentionally makes mistakes that favors…

Institutional researchers are often tasked with assessing why college-wide initiatives succeed or fail. This can be a difficult task: researchers need to discriminate between multiple feasible explanations, work with limited data, and produce compelling narratives. Process tracing is a qualitative methodology that enables researchers to make valid…

Estimating treatment effects for subgroups defined by posttreatment behavior (i.e., estimating causal effects in a principal stratification framework) can be technically challenging and heavily reliant on strong assumptions. We investigate an alternative path: using bounds to identify ranges of possible effects that are consistent with the data.…

A critical issue in educator preparation is how to ascertain if program graduates are sufficiently prepared to be effective through the acquisition of meaningful evidence of graduates' impact on their students. Challenges to proving specific impact of educator-preparation programs on student learning include identifying and following program…

Student attrition from colleges in the United States is a widespread phenomenon, posing real stresses to students, their families, and to universities. We examined the causes of poor academic performance in students' first semester through interviews and questionnaires and administered a small intervention course to freshmen on academic probation…

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of an attributional retraining program for helping upper-level undergraduates perform better in employment interviews as moderated by self-esteem levels. The sample consisted of 50 co-operative education students preparing for actual job interviews who were randomly assigned to an attributional…

The current study was undertaken to examine the effectiveness of the Rowan University-School of Osteopathic Medicine - Summer Pre-Medical Research and Education Program (Summer PREP), a postsecondary medical sciences enrichment pipeline program for under-represented and disadvantaged students. Thirty-four former program participants were surveyed…

This study reports problems faced by urban schools as well as teacher education's attempts to remedy these problems, and explores one college's effort to understand the complexities of teacher candidates' decision to work in urban schools. A paid field experience in an urban school district allowed teacher candidates to explore their perceptions…

This article is designed to present an overview of critical theory, research, and evaluation for the developmental mathematics educator. Students caught in the gap between high school mathematics preparation and entry-level college mathematics expectations--developmental mathematics education students--need to have their personal narratives told…

Faculty learning communities (FLC) provide opportunities for professional development and personal growth within university settings. Some FLC are structured; others are unstructured. Faculty at a mid-sized Midwestern state university were asked a series of close- and open-ended questions that examined the reasons for and benefits from their…

Background: Higher education is facing a number of problems: adjusting to larger and more heterogeneous student populations, increasing the number of graduating students, and preparing for lifelong learning. Improving learning competence can make a substantial contribution to solving each of these major concerns. The growing knowledge base on…